More on Patents

Harpo is at the hospital right now as he needs to get a bad cough of his looked into.  I am at his house, and I cannot make much progress on the car without Harpo here, so I have decided to do more research.  We have decided that we are going to take out a patent ourselves, so I must become our patent lawyer.

I thought a good place to continue my patent research would be the long page of general information on uspto.gov.

The first thing that has stood out to me is that, by law, patents can be filed for a “new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.”  Harpo and I have been discussing what kind of patent would be the simplest.  At the moment, I feel that a patent of some system in the car would be best.  It seems to me that a patent needs to describe exactly how something is created.  Harpo leans more towards the side of patent the way something is done, [process instead of machine], and has proposed patenting the entire car; “method of building an autonomous vehicle with LEGO® components.”  It seems that both methods would be possible, and I am trying to discover what way would be faster.

An interesting tidbit is that the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 disallows patents on nuclear weapons.  This fact could be material for much discussion.

Useful simply means that a machine must be able to do its intended purpose, not that it could actually be used for anything worthwhile.  Although, possibly we could be patenting a system of education; “method of learning how a two-speed transmission, independent suspension, and four-wheel drive function.”  But that would probably be even more difficult.

The USPTO has about 6,500 employees and receives about 350,000 patent applications per year.

The patent office does warn us that the majority of inventors have a patent lawyer patent their inventions.

We could either file provisionally [$105], or non-provisionally [$75 electronic filing, $255 search, $105 examination].  We must claim “small entity” status, otherwise it would be far more expensive.  A provisional patent is more of a reservation it seems, and cannot lead directly to a patent being granted, as it lack the claims.  It must be followed with a non-provisional application.  Once the patent is approved there is a $720 issue fee.  And it looks as though a trademark can be $275.

Non-provisional applications include a signed oath or declaration that the applicant believes they are the original inventor.